THE VARIETY you harvest, may soon be influenced by the data you harvest, if precision agriculture company, Farmers Edge can deliver.
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The Canadian company have announced 19 new tools for precision agriculture to be rolled out this year, one of which allows benchmarking crop varieties with other users.
Farmers Edge, global digital agriculture lead, Jamie Denbow said the new releases build on what was already a solid offering.
“The Farm Command platform contains our weather applications,” he said.
“As farmers sign onto the platform, we install weather stations on their farm.
“We currently have telemetry and machinery tracking.
“Also all applications are tracked and you can view your crop health indexes through satellite imagery.”
Mr Denbow said a soon to be released tool was a benchmarking functionality, which integrated yield data from users paddocks.
This, he said, allowed growers to compare the relative performance of crop varieties as well as their fertiliser responses.
Mr Denbow claims with as little as fifteen data points, or paddocks worth of data, the tool could report on differences between varieties.
This is significantly less then the number of data points, across multiple seasons, required to tease out an accurate varietal yield difference in paddock trials.
“We will not post any record from any variety that falls below 15 data points,” Mr Denbow said.
“To me that is the very baseline sample size.”
“If you have that few data points you are at risk of opening a growers identity.”
When questioned whether the data collected would be accurate, given seasonal variation, Mr Denbow said growers can choose the area they are analysing.
“The growers utilising the tool to do the analysis and they generally know the area,” he said.
“So if they know there was a specific event, which they know affected a particular variety, they may alter their sample area.
“From initial feedback from our bench marking with growers we have had good feedback.
“I think that data is only going to get stronger as we move ahead with our tools to have better calibration.”
Mr Denbow said the benchmarking tool would integrate with new harvest management features.
“The harvest manager is a device which can connect to any weigh cells,” he said.
“It gathers the information and transmits it to the harvest map being created.
“It forces a live calibration of the harvesters map versus what is being captured from the grain monitor.
“The other part is tracking that information back to amounts for storage, assigning ticket numbers.”
